Sheera Frenkel

Yes, FB is as bad as you think it is. From the lack of internal safeguards that let male engineers look up the information of women they were interested in—one of whom tracked down a woman with whom he’d had a fight after she left the hotel where they’d been staying--to crushing competition, it’s an organization out of control. The worst stories are about FB’s indifference to non-English speakers, where an inability to even understand hundreds of languages left FB ignorant of the genocidal campaigns being conducted on the site, particularly in Myanmar. The one person in charge of monitoring Myanmar spoke only Burmese, out of the about 100 languages present—as if a German speaker were responsible for moderating all Europe. Then FB refused to share information about deleted posts to prove the military’s responsibility for the genocide. “Facebook would cooperate … only if the United Nations created a mechanism to investigate human rights crimes. When [the relevant person] pointed out that the United Nations had such a system in place, known as the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, the Facebook representative looked at him with surprise and asked him to explain.” With great power does not, in fact, come great responsibility—not unless either law or an ethical compass provide it.… (meer)